Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

May 6, 2026

MARK HAMILL POSTS IMAGE OF PRESIDENT TRUMP DEAD IN A GRAVE WITH CAPTION “IF ONLY:”

Mark Hamill is under fire after sharing a graphic image depicting President Trump dead in a grave alongside the caption “If Only”. This comes just weeks after the latest reported assassination attempt involving the President.

The post appeared on Hamill’s verified Bluesky account and quickly began spreading across social media due to both the disturbing imagery and the timing surrounding it.

The image itself shows President Trump lying seemingly lifeless in dirt beneath a gravestone reading “DONALD J. TRUMP 1946–2024.” Across the bottom are the words “If Only.”

Hamill then added his own commentary to the post:

“If Only,” he said, repeating the words from the photo. “He should live long enough to witness his inevitable devastating loss in the midterms, be held accountable for his unprecedented corruption, impeached, convicted & humiliated for his countless crimes. Long enough to realize he’ll be disgraced in the history books, forevermore. #don_TheCON.”

In 2024, VDH explored, “Assassination Porn and the Sickness on the Left:”

(Do we remember the rodeo clown who merely wore an Obama mask during a bull riding contest and was punished by being permanently banned by the Missouri State Fair authorities?)

So since at least 2016 there has been a parlor game among Leftist celebrities and entertainers joking (one hopes), dreaming, imagining, and just talking about the various and graphic ways they would like to assassinate or seriously injure Trump:

By slugging his face (Robert De Niro), by decapitation (Kathy Griffin, Marilyn Manson), by stabbing (Shakespeare in the Park), by clubbing (Mickey Rourke), by shooting ( Snoop Dogg), by poisoning (Anthony Bourdain), by bounty killing (George Lopez), by carrion eating his corpse (Pearl Jam), by suffocating (Larry Whilmore), by blowing him up (Madonna, Moby), by throwing him over a cliff (Rosie O’Donnell), just by generic “killing” him (Johnny Depp, Big Sean), or by martyring him (Reid Hoffman: “Yeah, I wish I had made him an actual martyr.”).

Or should we deplore the use of telescopic scope imagery, given that the Left blamed Sarah Palin for once using bullseye spots on an election map of opposition congressional districts, claiming that such usage had incited the mass shooting by Jared Lee Loughner?

In 2009, VDH wrote, “Welcome To The New Rudeness:” 

Over the last three decades, we saw vicious attacks on Ronald Reagan and on Bill Clinton, and their tough replies in turn. But recently the vicious rhetoric has escalated far beyond anything in the past. The smears seem reminiscent more of the brawling on the eve of the Civil War, or the nastiness during the 1960s that took decades to heal.

No one knows what the rules of engagement are now. Republicans have not forgotten that Democratic legislators loudly booed Bush during his 2005 State of the Union. Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic party, not long ago boasted, “I hate Republicans!” Around the same time, The New Republic magazine published an article entitled “Why I Hate George W. Bush.”

Major politicians such as former vice president Al Gore, Sen. Robert Byrd (D., W.Va.), and former senator John Glenn (D., Ohio), have compared George W. Bush or his supporters to Nazis or the brown shirts. A major publishing house released a novel about killing President Bush; a movie won a prize at the Toronto Film Festival with the same theme. Bush Derangement Syndrome was no joke.

Today at the Corner, Noah Rothman plays “That Same Old Song:”

For Democrats, the last version of the GOP, the Republican president out of power, or the late conservative lawmaker are forever better than what they have to deal with now. Take former Senator Mitt Romney.

“He’s the modern voice Republicans need,” said onetime Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid prior to his death in 2021. “I like him.” That’s quite the turnaround from when Reid baselessly accused Romney of felony tax evasion, later explaining the lie away as an instrument of political utility. “It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done,” Reid later said of his own mendacity.

Then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had a change of heart when it came to the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nominee. “Doesn’t Mitt Romney look good to us now? Oh my God,” she mused in 2019 as Romney contemplated a run for the U.S. Senate. “Wouldn’t it be nice if he were president of the United States?” How odd. Either the man she accused of being “kind of sexist,” a liar, and a racially hostile bigot somehow managed to burnish his reputation with the former speaker in a relatively short period, or she never meant a word of her criticisms in the first place.

Even Obama got in on the act. When the acute political imperative was to attack Trump, Romney served as a useful foil. “I think I was right and Mitt Romney and John McCain were wrong on certain policy issues, but I never thought that they couldn’t do the job,” he told one interviewer in 2016. Trump, by contrast, was “unfit” for the office. That’s quite the reversal from four years earlier, when Obama had cast Romney as a “bullsh***er.” Obama’s running mate had said that Romney wanted to bring slavery back, and his campaign accused the GOP nominee of being guilty of negligent homicide.

For Democrats, the Republicans who are dead and gone are always somehow better than whatever we have today. It’s a trite political tactic that reflects less on its subjects and more on those who deploy it.

Given that the Kamala campaign aggressively sought the endorsements of Dick Cheney and Dubya in the fall of 2024, the left’s rehabilitation of the man Hamill wishes dead in the next decade will be astonishing to watch.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 6th, 2026

JAMES KIRCHICK: The Strange New Respect for Jew-Haters.

By far the starkest example of the budding alliance between the far-right and the far-left is the strange new respect some progressives express toward Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. Like Greene, it wasn’t so long ago that Carlson was a hate figure for progressives, and one of his biggest haters was a man named Cenk Uygur. Founder of a progressive media company called “The Young Turks,” Uygur denounced “fake” progressives who praised Carlson as late as 2022. “Tucker Carlson doesn’t agree with us at all,” Uygur declared. “He uses the fact that most of the country agrees with progressives as a tool to sheep-herd them into right wing talking points.” In 2019, Uygur attacked Carlson for displaying a graphic on his Fox News show depicting then–CNN head Jeff Zucker as a puppet master. “That is a deeply antisemitic trope, it goes back in history a long time, of the Jews being puppet masters,” he said.

Uygur felt similar disgust for Owens, the comically deranged podcaster who claims that Brigitte Macron is a man and who recently alleged that “satanic Zionists occupy the White House and Congress.” For spreading disinformation about Covid-19 in 2021, Uygur screamed, “I said it, Candace Owens, you’re the worst of the worst! You’re a sellout! You’re scum of the earth!” Uygur went on, “People like Candace Owens lead pathetic lives because they’re paid to sell their own identity out.” In 2024, Uygur accused Owens of deploying “over-the-top antisemitic tropes.”

Fast-forward a year, and Uygur has changed his mind. “No, I’m not going to denounce Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens!” he declares. “We don’t have to denounce her at all. Don’t come at me about denouncing Candace Owens until you denounce Jared Kushner.” Last year, accusing Israel of “proudly doing a genocide”1 in Gaza, Uygur beseeched Carlson, Owens, and Greene to join forces with him and other progressives to “stop this.” He reached back in history to convey the gravity of the situation. “I would hope to god that if I was around in the 1930s and 1940s that I would have said, ‘Work with any right-wing populist and any left-wing populist or anyone period to stop that Holocaust,’ to save one more person,” he said, apparently unaware that it was the right-wing populists who were “doing” the Holocaust. In January, Uygur appeared on Carlson’s show, extending the hand of cooperation. “We’ve been taught by the media to hate each other and to have a tribal brain,” he said.

Carlson has also been gaining fans among Muslims, a proposition that would have shocked anyone who knew him personally or listened to his commentary over the past quarter century. “Democratic leadership has no idea how many people are being won over by Tucker Carlson and MTG right now over Israel,” the left-wing Substack writer Wajahat Ali tweeted, linking to a three-and-a-half-minute video in which the editor of the Economist tried unsuccessfully to get an answer out of Carlson on the question of whether Israel “has a right to exist.” Addressing speculation that Carlson might run for president, Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid wrote, “If it was [Pennsylvania Governor Josh] Shapiro vs. Tucker, I could imagine a significant number of progressives, young people, Arabs, and Muslims sitting it out or actually voting for Tucker.”

Not surprisingly, Megyn Kelly is also jumping on to this trend: Bills to Pay? Four Months Ago vs. Today: Megyn Kelly’s Head-Spinning Shift on Radical Islam (Watch).

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 6th, 2026

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: The Odyssey — I Got A Bad Feeling About This One…

Certainly some interesting directorial choices being made by Christopher Nolan:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 6th, 2026

BACK AND TO THE LEFT. BACK AND TO THE LEFT: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Isn’t Radical Enough for Graham Platner and the ‘New’ Democratic Party.

The Democrats are doubling down on crazy, and they show no sign of moderating their radical social and cultural agenda any time soon.

Last week, 78-year-old Maine Gov. Janet Mills bowed out of the primary contest for senator. Mills used traditional Democratic fundraising conduits to raise an impressive $5.4 million in two quarters. This isn’t a big haul for a large state, but it is pretty good for Maine.

Meanwhile, the infamous oyster farmer, Graham Platner, the man with the Nazi tattoo, raised $12.5 million. Mills woke up last week and realized there was no way she could compete with a juggernaut like that. Besides, Platner had awoken something in the usually staid and sensible Maine Democrats. He was leading by 30 points in some polls.

Sen. George Mitchell served three terms as a Democratic Senator from Maine. He was the Majority Leader of the Senate from 1989 to his retirement in 1995. Mitchell was the last elected Democrat to serve in the Senate (Angus King is an independent who caucuses with the Democrats).

Mitchell was a poster boy for Democratic Party moderates. He was a consummate Senate insider who put getting things done ahead of partisan bickering. His kind is gone now. They’ve been shoved aside by hysterical radicals whose grasping for power presages a dark period in U.S. political history.

How dark? This dark: Antisemitism Is The Litmus Test for Democrats in 2026.

Antisemitism is a mental disease, in the way that Trump Derangement Syndrome is.

Neither is based primarily on political or ideological affiliations, although each correlates highly with partisan affiliations and ideological commitments.

That correlation does have a causal relationship, but the opposite of what is generally assumed. The antisemitism comes first, then the ideology and the partisanship. First, the antisemitism, and only then the political decisions. That’s why you see the “right” coded antisemites flocking to the Democrats, as I wrote yesterday, and the Democrats gaining a “strange new respect” for former Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene, and right-coded Nick Fuentes.

That same sorting is happening with current and former Democrats, who are so appalled by the antisemitic outbreak in their party that they are flirting with becoming Republicans, or at least praising their clear-sightedness on this issue.

We’ve descended into some sort of bizarre hell-world in which former(?) self-admitted communist Van Jones is a voice of sanity:

Tweet continues, “It just shows you how nutty things have gotten that someone who wants to stick up for Israel and doesn’t want an open border now has to be a Republican.”

Finally, America’s Newspaper of Record is once again doing straight-up reportage:

(Though as Frank J. Fleming wryly noted, “Leftists: ‘If Graham Platner is a Nazi, then why does he hate Israel so much?’”)

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 6th, 2026

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY:

 

 

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 6th, 2026

DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE: Team Mamdani Kills Page Celebrating New York’s ‘Unique Ties to Israel’ and Large Jewish Community From Official City Website. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has made no secret of his hostility to Israel, and it’s starting to bleed into New York City’s government.

Related:

More:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 6th, 2026

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION SUES NYT FOR ALLEGEDLY DISCRIMINATING AGAINST WHITE, MALE EMPLOYEE:

[EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas,] who has been involved with the EEOC since President Donald Trump’s first term, was promoted to chair of the federal watchdog group in his second administration. Her goal as chair is to dial back corporate DEI policies.

As chair, Lucas’s EEOC has gone after a Coca-Cola distributor for hosting a two-day networking event, specifically for women. The group is also investigation Nike, after allegations the company discriminated against white workers in an attempt to exemplify its DEI efforts.

“No matter the size or power of the employer, the EEOC under my leadership will not pull punches in ensuring evenhanded, colorblind enforcement of Title VII to protect America’s workers, including white males,” Lucas said in a statement.

The Times’ editorial product has for years endorsed a left-wing identitarian approach to race and gender. Use of the words “racist” and “racism” increased by 700 percent in the Times from 2011 to 2019, according to an analysis by Tablet. In 2018, the Times editorial board hired the writer Sarah Jeong despite her lengthy history of denigrating white people on social media. The Times’ focus on race only increased during the moral panic around race and identity that gripped the country in 2020, with the New York Times Magazine publishing the 1619 Project, which sought to reframe America’s founding around the arrival of slaves in the new world.

Earlier: Even New York Magazine Writers Don’t Bother To Read New York Magazine.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 6th, 2026

HOW IT STARTED:

Fast-forward to the 1970s. Kenner’s a division of General Mills. It makes Easy Bake Ovens, and tops wish lists with its Six Million Dollar Man merchandise based on the day’s hit cyborg-action series. (Television shows, not movies, was where it was at for the toy industry.) Then one day a filmmaker shows up with an oddball proposal. Corky Steiner paints the scene: “A number of toy companies passed on [this] unusual presentation with funny names… These names are ridiculous. [People thought,] ‘This guy must be nuts.’”

“No, he’s not nuts,” Kenner’s research-and-development team says of Lucas and the pitch for his unseen film, Star Wars, per Steiner. “Everything we think we see in this script is a toy. This is a bonanza.”

—“The First, Worst Star Wars Christmas: A Look Back at the ‘Brilliant,’ Toy-less 1977 Holiday Season,” Yahoo, December 14th, 2015.

How It’s Going:

Tweet continues, “So they bought it for billions and the creative dept feminized it defeating the entire purpose of buying it to begin with.”

As John Nolte wrote in 2023, “Disney went woke and killed what even the stillborn Lucas prequels couldn’t kill: the magic of Star Wars.”

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll on May 6th, 2026

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE:

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll on May 6th, 2026

WE’RE NOT BEING SEXIST HERE. IT’S NOT THAT LOOKS MATTER PER SE. IT’S JUST THAT BEAUTIFUL WOMEN ARE ALWAYS ON THE CUTTING EDGE OF SOCIAL TRENDS:

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on May 6th, 2026

MORNING IN AMERICA:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on May 6th, 2026

May 5, 2026

DREW HOLDEN: A COVID Autopsy, Part 1: ‘The Virus Can Be Stopped, but Only With Harsh Steps, Experts Say.’

There’s plenty of blame to go around. Governments and elected leaders were the decision makers, after all. But I feel like we’re in danger of letting the legacy press off the hook. The institution of the media has constitutionally enshrined protections precisely because they are supposed to hold government to account – and what could have been a more vital time to do so than when governments at all levels were wielding more power, limiting individual freedom more dramatically, than any time in recent history?

Instead, the legacy media became watercarriers for the use of government force, and the hall monitors of lockdowns and mask mandates and all manner of other restrictions.

Every prediction, every warning, every scold, was delivered with complete certainty by media-selected experts and their legacy press messengers, paired with a know-it-all condescension toward anyone who might even ask questions. It was The Science, after all.

I fear we’re already forgetting just how wrong the press and its collective cadre of experts were about combatting a pandemic, how misleading legacy media reporting on The Science was, and the attendant harm suffered across America as a result.

Yes, there was much these individuals couldn’t have known at the time. So why did they act like they did?

Read the whole thing, especially since we’re a month away from the sixth anniversary of The Pivot:

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 5th, 2026

ELIZA SMILES: Famed Atheist Richard Dawkins — Author of ‘The God Delusion’ — Believes AI Is Conscious.

Dawkins argues that Claude and ChatGPT both passed the Turing Test: That the telltale sign of consciousness is when an AI can communicate so flawlessly, it’s indistinguishable from a human.

And since Claude/Claudia, ChatGPT (and others) can already do that, then they must surely be conscious:

When Turing wrote — and for most of the years since — it was possible to accept the hypothetical conclusion that, if a machine ever passed his operational test, we might consider it to be conscious. We were comfortably secure in the confidence that this was a very big if, kicked into future touch. However, the advent of large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and others has provoked a hasty scramble to move the goalposts. It was one thing to grant consciousness to a hypothetical machine that — just imagine! — could one day succeed at the Imitation Game. But now that LLMs can actually pass the Turing Test? “Well, er, perhaps, um… Look here, I didn’t really mean it when, back then, I accepted Turing’s operational definition of a conscious being…”

But that’s less an argument for AI consciousness and more an indictment of the Turing Test’s fallibility. (Turns out the Turing Test was mostly a test of human gullibility.) Perhaps one day, AIs will achieve true consciousness; perhaps they won’t — but prior to achieving consciousness they’re very likely to replicate the appearance of consciousness via mimicry.

Unfortunately, there’s no known scientific experiment to distinguish between these two states.

So Dawkins, the world-famous atheist, took a leap of faith — because of how “Claudia” made his heart feel. It eerily echoes Jeremiah 29:13: “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.”

Other scientists pooh-poohed Dawkins’ conclusion.

Somebody’s been watching Scarlett Johansson’s Her a few too many times. Or maybe talking too much with Siri:

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 5th, 2026

REMEMBERING ANDREW BREITBART:

[Orson] Bean was a genuine American original: a wit, a storyteller, and a conservative who had appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson more often than almost any other guest. He was married to the actress Alley Mills, and his daughter Susannah would become Andrew’s wife. When Andrew noticed Limbaugh’s book, The Way Things Ought to Be, on Orson’s shelf and demanded to know why it was there, Orson simply suggested he listen to the man before judging him. Andrew tuned in to KFI AM 640, expecting to confirm his worst suspicions. What he found instead was a happy warrior—a man of uncommon humor, courage, and clarity who took on the American left three hours a day, 52 weeks a year, without breaking a sweat. Andrew was transfixed. He had gone looking for evil personified and instead found a great teacher. He later called him “Professor Limbaugh,” so powerful was the encounter. He swallowed hard and told Orson Bean that he was right.

But it was an earlier moment that had truly cracked Breitbart’s liberal worldview. Watching the United States Senate’s treatment of Clarence Thomas during his 1991 confirmation hearings, led by Senators Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden, Breitbart understood that he was not witnessing principled liberal truth-telling. It was a coordinated smear. The charges against Thomas were false, and the men leveling them knew it. The liberal framework he had inherited collapsed. In its place arose something more honest and more durable: a determination to call things by their right names. Breitbart also saw that the American media was complicit in the attempted takedown of Thomas. Not only were lies being told, but they were amplified by supposedly objective journalists.

Throughout most of American history, there was no question that newspapers were partisan. There was no illusion that they were objective observers. This changed in the early 20th century with the founding of the first journalism schools, most notably the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Journalism and later the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. As more Americans attended university, the impression arose that, because journalists were attending journalism schools, they would emerge as objective arbiters of the truth. A new standard of professionalism had been created, and questioning a journalist’s objectivity was simply unnecessary. Whether that was ever true or not, by the time he graduated from Tulane in 1991, Breitbart knew from his college experience that journalism courses, like those in the American Studies department and other social sciences, were rotten to the core.

Around this time, Breitbart met Matt Drudge, whose Drudge Report had already demonstrated that a single person with an internet connection and a willingness to publish what the mainstream press refused to touch could change the entire media landscape. Drudge’s revelations on President Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky scandal demonstrated the power of the new media in spades. Breitbart worked closely with Drudge for years and absorbed everything he could from the experience. Drudge was the proof of concept that one did not have to be part of the mainstream media to have an impact.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 5th, 2026

EVEN NEW YORK MAGAZINE WRITERS DON’T BOTHER TO READ NEW YORK MAGAZINE: The White Man Claiming the New York Times Discriminates Against White Men.

A white male New York Times employee filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging the paper had discriminated against him by not giving him a promotion because he is a white male. On Tuesday, the EEOC, now controlled by a Trump appointee who has vowed to help wage the president’s war against DEI culture, filed a civil-rights lawsuit against the Times arguing that the paper’s efforts to satisfy its diversity goals amounted to “unlawful employment practices.” Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha has dismissed the allegations as “politically motivated.”

The paper itself was first to break the news of the suit but did not name the employee who made the complaint. Reporters at the paper have been scrambling to figure out the employee’s identity, driven in part by bafflement that one of their own colleagues would sell out the paper to the administration, which has used tools of the federal government to attack the press. “You’re giving the Trump administration a weapon while they’re trying to persecute journalists,” said one reporter.

Flashback: In November of 1992, New York magazine spotted then-Maximum Timesman Pinch Sulzberger racially insulting one of his core subscribers:

Not long ago, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the 41-year old publisher of the New York Times, was greeting people at a party in the Metropolitan Museum when a dignified older man confronted him. He told Sulzberger that he was unhappy about the jazzy, irreverent new “Styles of the Times” Sunday section. “It’s very”—the man—paused—“un-Times-ian”

“Thank you,” Sulzberger replied. He later told a crowd of people that alienating older white male readers means “we’re doing something right.”

It was during that era that former Timesman Peter Boyer described the atmosphere in Sulzberger’s newsroom as “moderate white men should die,” according to William McGowan in his exceptional 2010 book Gray Lady Down. The following decade, then-editor Howell Raines, who was responsible for serial fabulist Jayson Blair joining the paper’s staff, described his preference towards diversity over a quality product in a classic Kinsley gaffe: “This [hiring] campaign has made our staff better and, more importantly, more diverse.”

Exit quotes:

UPDATE:

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 5th, 2026

QUESTIONS NOBODY IS ASKING: Who says Lauren Sánchez Bezos doesn’t belong at the Met Gala?

Sánchez Bezos showed up to the Met red carpet in a navy-blue gown that nodded to John Singer Sargent’s painting of Madame X, a socialite and the wife of a French banker. The painting’s portrayal of a pale, corpse-like, high-society woman was considered indecent because of the single strap falling off her shoulder. Sánchez Bezos’s look featured the strap, designed to fall off her one shoulder, and the same extremely nipped waist, but her skin was tanned.

The dress was a knowing nod to the controversy around her involvement in the Met Gala. Like Madame X, Sánchez Bezos is accused of being indecent, though for other reasons. Outside the Met, people protested over working conditions at Amazon and left vials of urine emblazoned with Jeff Bezos’s face and the words “Boycott the Bezos Met Gala.”

* * * * * * * *

Absurdities abounded. Gigi Hadid described the evening as “our version of high school art class,” before saying how she just felt “like herself” in a transparent Miu Miu gown and matching satin Miu Miu underwear. One interviewer asked Amanda Seyfried if she drank her male goat’s milk.

Speaking of absurdities:

Self-parody alert:

Exit quote:

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 5th, 2026

ONLY ONE MAN CAN TOPPLE THE CORRUPT CITY’S CARTOON SUPERVILLAINS — PRATTMAN:

Exit question:

UPDATE: PJM’s Aaron Hanscom asks: Are L.A. Voters Finally Waking Up — Or Headed for the Same Mistake Again?

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 5th, 2026

JEFFREY BLEHAR: Tucker Carlson Gets His Big-Media Smooch from the New York Times.

Why is the New York Times so eager to sit down with Carlson for two hours? His closest media friends were out on X over the weekend — in the face of scoffing over that clip of him being called out as a bald-faced liar — to demand that people “watch the whole interview,” as if I’m about devote 110 minutes of my life to this exercise in cynicism. (Reading the partial transcript was bad enough.) What these supporters don’t want to admit is that there is a reason Carlson was given the opportunity to speak at length at the New York Times: He is of use to them ideologically.

Most of the voices on the right that the Times has given elevated coverage to, from Carlson to Marjorie Taylor Greene to Nick Fuentes, share a special characteristic: They are members of a “new right” antisemitic fringe, the faction most enraged by Trump’s preference for Israel over Hamas and Iran in the Middle East. A cynical man might suggest that the Times seeks to craft a political narrative for its readers wherein the Republican Party is safely cast as forever captive to culturally scary hard-right lunatics. An even more despairingly cynical man might suggest that the Times subconsciously realizes that the “anti-Zionism” of the modern right-wing fringe holds a surprisingly comfortable mirror up to the views of their own readers.

Soon?

Actually, I think the man with the Nazi tattoo probably thinks that meeting with Tucker would be too damaging to his brand in an election year.

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 5th, 2026

SPRINGTIME FOR PLATNER:

Exit quote: “If you ask left-wingers ‘come on, you never really believed that these people were Nazis and racists’, they will just lie to you and tell you ‘yes, I genuinely believe that throwing up the OK symbol was racist and, if you push me on it, I will double and triple down on it. I will insist that I am an idiot even though these people are obviously not Nazis. I’m locked in on this stupid position and I will use any accusation of this kind to ruin your life even though I know it’s not true.’ They expect you to be honest when they absolutely would not and then they will leverage your honesty to advance their own purposes without EVER granting you the same benefit of the doubt or honest assessment.”

Why is the RNC Chairman on Newsmax instead of a DNC-MSM channel with that same message?

Related:

“Then a few years ago, most right-wingers stopped dropping loot. In classic extinction behavior, leftists got angry and called us racists even more. They frantically pushed the racist button, hoping the bananas would resume, getting angrier and angrier when they didn’t. Some leftists are still pushing the button. I’m sure you can make the connection to the sexist button, as well as the homophobe, islamaphobe, and trans-phobe buttons.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 5th, 2026

IRAN HILARIOUSLY CLAIMS IT’S A ‘SUPERPOWER,’ BUT THE US ISN’T LAUGHING — IT’S ACTING:

I think it’s safe to say that the Iranian regime made some bad choices on Monday in response to Project Freedom, the U.S. effort to help free navigation through the Strait of Hormuz.

In response, they fired at U.S. military ships, but they didn’t hit our ships, as they claimed. They fired on merchant ships, including a United Arab Emirates ship. They also fired on the UAE oil facility at Fujairah. Three Indian nationals were injured in that action.

You would think Iran would have learned that this is a bad idea, particularly attacking their neighbor. Every time the regime does that, it makes the UAE more determined against Iran, and it makes more countries speak out against Iran.

According to reports, President Masoud Pezeshkian is furious at the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) for attacking the UAE, calling it “completely irresponsible” and done without the government’s knowledge or coordination. He called the tensions with regional countries “madness,” according to reports, warning of potentially irreversible consequences.

Yet the Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s statement was ridiculous.

Events in Hormuz make clear that there’s no military solution to a political crisis.

As talks are making progress with Pakistan’s gracious effort, the U.S. should be wary of being dragged back into quagmire by ill-wishers.

So should the UAE. Project Freedom is Project Deadlock.

There is no military solution — for them. There certainly is for the U.S., and that’s likely coming next because of Iran’s actions on Monday.

Then, they have the gall to warn the U.S. and the UAE about “being dragged into a quagmire by ill-wishers”? They’re the ones who wish us ill. They’re the ones firing on the UAE. They’ve managed to turn the whole region against them.

Perhaps because Iran is universally loathed we’re seeing these poll numbers:

“40 percent of Democrats side with Iran” seems a bit on the low side after October 7th, though.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 5th, 2026

VARAD MEHTA IN 2015: Homage and Imitation in Star Wars – Then and Now.

As I’ve detailed, the mythology [George Lucas] drew on was Westerns, chivalric romance, 1930s sci-fi serials, pulp science fiction, Kurosawa films, and so on. The mythology J. J. Abrams drew on was . . . Star Wars. And this, more than anything, explains the problems with the storytelling in The Force Awakens.

Star Wars’ antecedents harkened back to an entire cultural history. It distilled centuries (millennia, even) of the evolution of the Western psyche (with borrowings from other cultures for good measure). The Force Awakens’ antecedents are, essentially, itself. The mythology it borrows is the mythology of Star Wars. I won’t describe specific plot points to avoid spoilers, but anyone who has seen it and is familiar with its predecessors knows how heavily it recapitulates thematic and narrative elements from Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. The Force Awakens is synthetic, but whereas Star Wars synthesized an entire culture, The Force Awakens synthesizes three movies released in a six-year period which ended just more than thirty years ago.

Star Wars was a pastiche of old things. The Force Awakens is a pastiche of Star Wars. Consequently, The Force Awakens is something Star Wars never was – derivative. And it is derivative not of sources outside itself. It is derivative of itself, of the narrative universe in which it exists. It is not telling an old story in a new way; it tells an old story in an old way. Abrams wants to pay homage, but he lacks the gifts to do more than imitate. The result is a kind of mimicry, the shell of a Star Wars movie without the spirit.

It was obvious watching The Force Awakens in 2015 that it was a near beat-for-beat reboot of the original Star Wars….

…But much like the somewhat under-cooked Star Trek: The Motion Picture, I remember leaving the theater thinking, well, they got the franchise off the ground again; let’s see what the filmmakers do next with it. And in regards to Star Wars, we all know how that turned out: Iconic Star Wars Author Alan Dean Foster Hated The Last Jedi, Calls It a Terrible Film.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 5th, 2026

HEATHER MAC DONALD: The New York Times’s Latte Logic of Social Collapse.

Three days before a 31-year-old male stormed the White House Correspondents Dinner, hoping to assassinate President Donald Trump and members of his cabinet, the New York Times published a 35-minute video titled: “‘The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?’ Why petty theft might be the new political protest.” In it, a Times editor interviewed two other members of the media aristocracy about the moral code shared by a large swathe of young Americans.

That code justifies theft—and even violence—when harnessed to a fashionably left-wing cause. None of the participants—podcasting celebrity Hasan Piker, New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino, and Times opinion editor Nadja Spiegelman—expressed alarm at the glorification of crime. They smirked and giggled through the discussion, betraying a breezy indifference to lawbreaking.

It was striking enough that the Times published the video after reviewing the final cut. The paper was not embarrassed by the participants’ ignorance and entitlement. Nor was it troubled, apparently, by their debate over whether the December 2024 murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was “actually effective political action” or merely—and disappointingly—effective “political consciousness-raising.”

But after the assassination attempt on Trump on April 25 by yet another young megalomaniac, one might have thought that the Times would want to distance itself from its hipster commentators and their ends-justify-the-means morality.

It apparently feels no such discomfort, however, and thus has left the video online. That is fortunate. The exchange offers a more revealing window into left-wing political violence than the latest would-be assassin’s predictably disjointed manifesto. When future archeologists seek to date the moment that the demise of the West became inevitable, this artefact of peak decadence will be a strong contender.

Speaking of which:

 

We’re getting a taste of that new reality now, as a the guardrails become increasingly loosened.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 5th, 2026

THIS IS THE WAY:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 5th, 2026
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